King pigeon
breed of pigeon
The King pigeon is a breed of pigeon developed over many years of selective breeding primarily as a utility breed.
Harry Baker, created the first Kings much more through tenacious, planned, and skillful breeding than serendipity. What Harry needed was a bird that was both beautiful and productive. Productive at this time meant to be eaten.
Kings along with other varieties of domesticated pigeons are all descendants from the rock dove (Columba livia).
The breed is known for its large size and suitability for squab production.
Show Kings
The breed also has a variety bred for exhibition purposes at pigeon shows. It is called the Show King to distinguish it from the purely utility variety. The American Pigeon Journal even devoted special issues to the Show King for August 1938, June 1959, January 1964, and November 1970. The Show King is dual purpose and can be used for squab raising.
“King pigeon” enters the record as breed of pigeon. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what King, pigeon and breed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q503463. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1938, 1959, 1964 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “King pigeon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.